Improving New Technology Commercialisation Exploring the Barriers to Co-Development

The marketing literature clearly indicates that one activity which is highly associated with the successful commercial development of new technology is the involvement of potential customers in the process as intimately and as early as possible. This paper summarises the literature on the value of customer involvement and concludes that the process of "co-development" has extra merit. This is not, however, universally employed by new technology originator firms. This paper also explores the apparent barriers to the involvement of customers and found that, among other things, trust seems to be an essential element in allowing technology originators to enter into necessary relationships with potential customers. It is likely that participants in such joint developments had experienced a number of similar, trusting business relationships. Those who rated themselves as being unwilling to divulge confidential information with potential customers, which is essential to the process, seemed to have few other trusting business relationships. The methodology that was used to explore the question empirically is described together with the fieldwork that was conducted. A single industry, the electronics industry, was examined in one state of Australia. The industry comprises small and medium-sized enterprises who trade with customers locally, nationally and internationally. A sample of 15 companies in the industry, as well as some of their customers, were subjected to purposive, in-depth interviews. The findings are drawn from this relatively small pool of qualitative data and the limitations of the study, as well as the areas for further research, are indicated at the end of the paper.